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Tag: homemadepasta

My first ever attempt at making my own pasta. I basically combined a bunch of different techniques i found on the web into my own style, and was really happy with how it turned out.

So for the pasta:

I happened upon some ‘0’ rated pasta flour by chance in Fresh Provision’s Mt Lawley while getting essentials… milk, bread, belgian chocolate etc. I thought to myself… it’s about time i try this homemade pasta caper out… and so the seeds were sewn.

Coming home, i did the perfunctory searches for “home made pasta” and came up with enough to whet my appetite, just enough rope to hang myself, and a few other catch phrases of less noteworthy quality.

The quantites indicated are for four helpings. Pour the flour onto a flat cool work surface, preferably marble, into a mound shape a “fontana”. Make a deep dent in the top and break in the eggs. With your fingers or with a fork, gently mix in the eggs with the flour. When all the egg has been absorbed into the flour, knead the dough for 15/20 minutes until it is firm and tiny bubbles appear on the surface. Form a ball with the dough and flatten it slightly with the palm of your hand. Using a rolling pin, start flattening the pasta out, then roll it out into a thin even sheet. Work slowly and rythmically.

In reality the dish served 2/3 people, probably because i didn’t roll it thin enough…. having only realised after I started making it that i didnt have a rolling pin. I ended up using a sturdy left over bottle of olive oil…which was actually quite good. I just made sure to keep adding flour to the wet patches, so it didn’t stick at all, and from a novices point of view, it looked pretty good.

I also didn’t have a pasta cutter or any other fancy type equipment, so when it was time to make some shapes i took my trusty Wusthof paring knife and sliced as thinly and evenly as i could into some fat fettucini/tagliatelle-ish strips. They looked pretty funky when they came out, the relative unevenness of my rolling and the little kinks in the slicing got accentuated after cooking into somewhat rustic (for want of a term Jamie Oliver would use to describe something crappy) looking patterns. It was however, rather satisfying that it turned out like actual pasta… it was also a lot fresher tasting, with much less starchy nastiness, and took about 1 minute to cook (!)

The rest of the dish was an afterthought to be honest.

I found some salmon that had to be used, and braised it in some white wine til it was just cooked on the outside.

In the meantime i made a simple roux and added to it some white wine, basil, rosemary, salt, pepper, and peccorino cheese.

Once the sauce was done, i poured it over the salmon, added the pasta, and then threw in the baby spinach on top… gave it just a minute to soften and then served it up.

So there you go. A simple meal in the finish, but very tasty. Bouyed by the relative success of this effort, i’ll definitely be giving it a shot again in the near future, with perhaps some more exotic variants and/or additions.

Let me know in the comments if you found this recipe vaguely interesting :)

Sadly, my skills as a photographer are not improving, but the food is still getting eaten…